YOU HAVE READ THIS CHAPTER TITLE CORRECTLY, THE “TRIUMPH of paganism.” If you already know some of this story, this should be where I speak calmly and admiringly of the triumph of Christianity. I should take the long view and recall the humble beginnings, daunting opposition, deep faith, and perhaps divine intervention that made Christianity the supreme religious cult and experience of the later Roman world. There’s still some truth to that old story, but not enough. Again, the real history is elsewhere.
The first dynasty of Roman emperors, the Julio-Claudians, expired with the spiraling descent of Nero in June of the year 68 CE. Half a century later, the historian Tacitus, recounting the “year of four emperors” that followed in 69, discerned what he called the “secret of empire”: the realization that emperors could be made in places other than Rome. That year saw the contest fought by Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and the successful Vespasian, each heading an army of his own. Tacitus contributes to the practice of using the word imperator to describe the supreme ruler of Rome, a word Augustus had shied away from. The imperator from which we get the English word emperor means “general, commander,” ideally one holding authority over the Senate and people of Rome. (It was a title strictly to be conferred after the fact, on a returning victor.) From 69 onward, the military supplied the greatest number of rulers for Rome. The preponderance of exceptions came when existing emperors chose relatives to join them on or near the throne. It is not fashionable to speak of Diocletian’s “tetrarchy” as a “junta,” but our fastidiousness about words should not blind us to the great resemblance to modern societies where generals rule.
After Julian’s demise and Jovian’s brief moment, Valentinian’s family took control. A generation ago it was fashionable to compare the flood of officers from Valentinian’s native Pannonia who quickly surrounded the throne to the presence of Georgians in Jimmy Carter’s presidential administration, but in such a system tested loyalty is essential. Valentinian, reigning from 364 to 375, needed help and so brought along after him his brother, Valens, and then his sons, Gratian and Valentinian II.1 None of those three merits our respect. Valens was killed when his bungled handling of a refugee crisis turned it into a disastrous military campaign.2
With only the youngsters Gratian and Valentinian II surviving, the army urgently needed leadership. The choice fell on a successful officer from Spain, living in retirement back home but still in his early thirties and ready to come when called. Theodosius took the throne alongside Gratian and Valentinian II at Milan in 379 and proceeded immediately across the Balkans to take responsibility for the eastern frontiers of empire. He would later bring to the throne after him his own two unripe sons, Honorius and Arcadius, and Arcadius in turn would continue a dynasty in Constantinople. What they did after Theodosius was gone was often inept and sometimes dangerously so. With Arcadius begins the long tradition of emperors more often chosen in the palace than in the army, and often better left unchosen.3
Theodosius was a success, no question. He was also firmly Christian. He was not chosen for his religious views, but religion had a powerful influence in his rule. He intervened decisively in the simmering theological controversies that lingered from the council held at Nicea. In February 380, he made his own position clear in a slashing decree that firmly espoused Nicene theology as it had survived and reshaped itself by that time. Where Constantine had backed away from Nicea under prudent ecclesiastical advice, Theodosius enforced it. He had been raised on Nicene piety in a world where Christianity commanded respect, his military career postdated Julian, and he was himself from the Nicene far west. He engineered another council of the church’s leaders, to be held at Constantinople in 381, under imperial supervision.
This council firmly reasserted Nicea and its slightly revised formulation is what is now recited in churches as “the Nicene creed.” Where the last fifty-odd years had seen imperial vacillation tending toward the Arian end of the spectrum, henceforth Theodosius was unambiguously in favor of Nicea and the term homoousios. Now we begin to hear first the word Catholic (universal) used consistently as a proper adjective, to claim universal authority for the emperor’s brand of Christianity. The word had long been in use by all as a generic descriptor of one of Christianity’s excellences, but now it was claimed aggressively and put to use as a brand name for a faction.4
It took time, but the creed and the word homoousios won out. Accepting the identity of godhead with a human figure would raise other questions, questions that became the focus of equally heated dispute in the fifth century over questions of Christology, giving rise to the labels of “Nestorianism” and “Monophysitism” for variants from orthodoxy that subsist in some parts of the world even today.
Theodosius’s world had internalized the idea of paganism that Constantine’s revolution had given rise to. For him, it was clear that beyond the pale of orthodox Christianity lay Jews and heretics, and beyond there in outer darkness practitioners of an undifferentiated mass of cults of false gods. We can’t know just what religious instruction the young officer Theodosius had, but we see in his years an increasing emphasis on the makeshift Christian interpretation that held the pagan gods to be demons or fallen angels. That gave them a place in the Christian story as beings partaking of divine qualities but of lesser quality and a diabolical insubordination. If you believe that, then it is a short step for a Christian imperial leader to decide he must do something about the paganism problem.
The Theodosian program against the pagans took two forms, overt and tacit. Tacit repression took the form of tolerated local violence that could flare up and die down in spasms over many parts of the empire over decades. To call it terrorism rewrites it into a modern idiom that may mislead, but the connection must be seen. Temples were sacked by imperial soldiers in some places, while in others soldiers turned a blind eye as local zealots did the dirty work.5 Violent suppression of religious practice was occasionally employed by emperors and governors in what Christians would recall as the age of persecution to achieve relatively modest tactical ends and usually petered out in a few weeks or months into healthy relapsed tolerance. The religious violence of Christianity and Islam, Abraham’s two younger children, had a deep religious motivation and a high religious goal—salvation for the terrorist and even for his victim.
Take one of Theodosius’s most ardent and closest followers, Maternus Cynegius, unknown until he showed up in the retinue of Theodosius and quickly achieved power.6 By 384, five years into Theodosius’s orthodox times, Cynegius had become praetorian prefect, the highest officer of the imperial cabinet. A couple of years later, he began a grand ceremonial tour of the eastern provinces. This was a routine imposition on the main provincial cities, when they had to be gracious and welcoming to the prefect and his huge retinue, laying on speeches of welcome and listening to polite expressions and occasional barbed directives in return. In this case, Cynegius sent clear signals about the behavior he was prepared to tolerate, and so around him and in his wake broke out the worst cascade of antitemple assaults yet seen in the Roman world. In a whole series of cities along the Euphrates frontier, Edessa, Apamea, and Palmyra, temples were destroyed by bands of monks—and it’s a Christian source a generation later, the historian Theodoret, who proudly tells us this. A contemporary gentleman of the old school, the distinguished professor Libanius of Antioch, watched this progress with acute dismay, offering a public oration in protest. It was Cynegius’s awful wife who egged on the even more awful monks, Libanius said, on a campaign of pillage ostensibly in the name of religion but really conducted out of motives of vulgar greed. Libanius knew the emperors had proclaimed a policy of tolerance, but could not admit that such policy could be undermined by connivance in high places. He would surely have protested the more if he had read, as we can today, the law of Theodosius from 382 that declared the great temple in Edessa (modern Urfa, Turkey) should be protected not for its religious significance but for its art. Cynegius likely saw to that one’s ruin nonetheless, among many others. Ugliness was abroad.
In 391, Theodosius grew more decisive. His first enactment along these lines strictly forbade public officials from any participation in sacrifice on penalty of a fine of fifteen pounds of gold—with the sting that the official’s professional staff would also be fined the same amount unless they could show that they had resisted and opposed the official’s actions. Where Constantine had been sure to enable Christians to participate in public life, this enactment went much further to prevent traditionalists from carrying out public office in a traditional way. This again is a sign not of hostile resistance on behalf of the old but of hostile affirmation of the new. The penalties are substantial, but nonviolent. Violence was left to vandals in the streets.
That law was followed in 391 and 392 by a series of increasingly general prohibitions. By November 392, this general edict went to the praetorian prefect Rufinus:
No one at all, of any family or rank, in office or out of office, powerful by birth or born in a low condition, in no place at all, in no city, is to slaughter a victim before senseless graven images or venerate the lares with fire by lighting candles, the genius with wine and libations, the penates with sweet smelling garlands.7
This was the first time that Roman government formally banned sacrifice and in all its forms, even modest ones, for all people and everywhere. Theodosius would not have ventured it if he weren’t certain he could make it stick. The implementation of such a law tells us that there was something to forbid, though the facts of Roman law enforcement meant that no such law could imagine being universally or consistently applied. The most direct impact was likely on the behavior of high officials, as many or as few as still practiced habitual traditionalism.
There is a dog in the nighttime to hear here, snoring very softly. Everything I have said in these last chapters about the steps taken to support and advance the cause of Christianity has had to do with the material circumstances in which the church operated. The flow of money and support and prestige toward the Christians, the flow of these same resources away from traditional cults, and the increasing interdiction of perfectly ordinary traditional behavior: this is how empire worked. What’s striking is the absence of missionary activity.8 Certainly there was recruitment and adoption of new Christians at a local level, but the rise of Christianity to near-universal adoption in the Roman world of the fourth and fifth centuries occurred without great missionary efforts, or what we might call “outreach.” To hear a Christian preacher, even a great one like Ambrose or Augustine, you had to go into his building to listen—only then to be turned out in midservice while the baptized faithful remained for their eucharistic rite.
Then suddenly for a few years in the 390s we hear more about paganism—from Christians. Christians then and many modern readers have been at pains to construct the necessary story of pagan survival and resistance out of very heterogeneous materials. It’s hard to trace, but real resistance happened—away from the bright light of day. People continued to practice their traditional religions, out of habit and loyalty to one’s ancestors. The ordinary persisted where it could.9 Meanwhile, Christians constructed a gaudy story of struggle, resistance, and triumph. Taking the latter seriously tells us little about the former.
Life went on. Wealthy families raised children, threw weddings, and bit by bit, as the times and pressures changed, found themselves more and more associated with the new church and its practices. “Who could have believed,” Jerome crowed, “that to the heathen pontiff Albinus should be born—in answer to a mother’s vows—a Christian granddaughter? That a delighted grandfather should hear from the little one’s faltering lips Christ’s ‘Alleluia’, and that in his old age he should nurse in his bosom one of God’s own virgins?” A generous observer would find the scene charming and unexceptional.10 Albinus has perhaps the distinction of being one of the last known surviving members of a traditional Roman priesthood, for the old offices died out amazingly quickly after 391, and by 400 all had vanished.11 The other lastling recorded was Flavius Macrobius Longinianus, known to have been a member of a priesthood but also named prefect of the city under Theodosius’s government in the 390s. Scholars who insist on dividing the world into pagans and Christians acknowledge that he may have gone over from the one to the other by that time. They exaggerate what it took for a distinguished gentleman to find a convenient and unobjectionable way to make himself harmless to the regime in power.12
Old conservatisms sometimes ran foul of each other. When Praetextatus, the praetorian prefect whom Symmachus had counted on for support in the matter of the Altar of Victory, had been buried, there arose a question whether a statue would be erected in his honor by the vestal virgins. To the surprise and unpursued bafflement of modern enthusiasts for the story of the great clash of pagan and Christian cultures, his friend and supporter Symmachus, likely because of his overall conservatism, was the one who opposed the erection of that statue.
When the emperor Gratian had given over the robes and title of pontifex maximus, the surviving college of pontiffs at Rome would have had to decide how to respond. There were two main possibilities. First, they could recognize the action and proceed, in very old ways going back eleven hundred years, to select a new pontifex maximus. Alternatively, they could hold that the emperor was temporarily misguided and hold the chair open for him out of respect for throne and empire and tradition. Both sides stood for conservative and traditional views. To one school of thought Praetextatus himself would be the natural and logical successor, the first nonimperial pontifex maximus since 12 BCE. The statue the vestals thus wanted to erect to his memory would have been in honor of him in that role. The opposition was based in the view that he had not officially held that role, but that it still inhered in the throne and would be restored when the emperors came to their senses. Even a decade later, few would have cared so much.
Those vestal virgins of the 380s were still supplied by willing families to a life of service and withdrawal, but it’s far from an accident that the same families in this period also saw daughters and widowed women withdrawing from the world of marriage to take up the life of Christian asceticism instead. The persistence of this tradition lay both in the recognition that husbandless women of a certain class deserved a seemly life and in the habit of that life being divinely approved. When Theodosius finally took away the last public support—financial support—from the old religious practices, the vestals vanished. Surely there was a poignant story we do not know of, on the last day in the house of Vesta, when the fire thought to have been kept burning for centuries went out for the last time, but poignancy is the rule of human life. If the vestals, moreover, managed to persist as long as the year 410, their vanishing would most likely then have resulted from the sack of Rome by the Visigoths. The end would have come when no one lifted a finger to restore what had been.13
In the 390s, we have often been told, people did still care about keeping the gods and their worship alive. In 392, there was a coup. Theodosius had quashed the uprising of Magnus Maximus that cost Gratian his life, took effective command of the whole empire, and supervised the padded-cell regency of Valentinian II in the west. A general beholden to Theodosius named Arbogast managed affairs at Valentinian’s court. Valentinian, rising age twenty-one, rebelled, feebly. He professed to dismiss Arbogast and invited Ambrose from Milan to come to his own court in Vienne in southern Gaul to baptize him in the ways of Nicene orthodoxy. What Valentinian was thinking, if thinking is the right word for it, we will not know, but on the fifteenth of May 392 he was found by his courtiers in the palace in Vienne, dead by hanging, agent or agents unknown. Ambrose was polite enough to write a eulogy, but prudent enough not to let politics or moral judgment intrude on his words.
Ambrose had just had his own dustup with Theodosius two years earlier, launching an excommunication against him after the reasonably commonplace horror of a mass murder. A local uprising had angered Theodosius and so he sent in troops; thousands were killed; the emperor (professedly) repented and tried to send a command to countermand his first order, but failed; and the bishop saw a chance to intervene by appealing to the emperor’s vulnerable presentation of himself as a devout Christian. Theodosius was the first baptized emperor who might take such a punishment seriously. Excommunication led to a few months’ standoff, but then emperor and bishop made their peace with each other.
So Valentinian was dead: what then? The western general, Arbogast, at first proclaimed that Theodosius’s son Arcadius, all of fifteen years old, would be emperor for the west. When that proclamation went unanswered from the east, Arbogast saw a chance and selected an emperor of his own, the kind chosen by a general unsure of himself. (Arbogast was a “Frank” and generals with “barbarian” heritage did not push themselves forward to the throne.) His choice, Eugenius, was clearly a puppet. Moderns emphasize that he had once been a teacher of rhetoric, like Ausonius who did become praetorian prefect, but that meant little to Arbogast. Eugenius’s great features for Arbogast were convenience and pliability. At first Theodosius reacted with equanimity, but then saw that the future succession of his own young sons was at some risk and so in January 393 formally named Honorius, then all of eight years old, Augustus for the western empire. Arbogast and Eugenius were now to be seen as usurpers and so their only choice—to their dismay and perhaps even surprise—was to fight.
To give him a regime and some strength, Eugenius and his handlers selected a new “cabinet,” featuring most notably Nicomachus Flavianus, a well-connected senator at Rome, to serve as praetorian prefect. Flavianus had served in the same office under Valentinian from 390 to 392, and so he knew the job and the staff and presumably had Arbogast’s trust. The rump regime, fighting from necessity rather than purpose, had no chance. In 394—Theodosius was patient and careful—in a battle on the river Frigidus (the modern Isonzo, at the head of the Adriatic), Eugenius and Arbogast were killed. Flavianus committed suicide a few days later.